The more a company knows about its customers' vision of the future, the better that company can design and deliver products and services to suit its customers' needs. Also, the more customers know about a company's vision of the future, the better customers can position themselves to take advantage of the company's products and services. Scenario development is a process related to futures studies that is widely used by organizations as a way to document and share their vision of the future and as a way to test strategies against uncertain future developments. The product of scenario development is a scenario, which, as used herein, is a synopsis, written in a narrative format, of the future of a particular topic.
The building blocks of a typical scenario include change drivers, market experiences, and trends. Change drivers are fundamental forces that change the nature of societies and economies across the globe. Change drivers are universal. That is, each change driver is happening all over the world at the same time. Some change drivers may occur independently, while others occur interdependently. When interdependent, changes in the rate and intensity of one change driver impact other change drivers and all forces that the other change drivers affect.
Exemplary change drivers include: commoditization, which is the process by which previously distinguishable products become seen by consumers as interchangeable and differentiated only by price; democratization, which is the process by which autocratic or totalitarian political systems are replaced by a more or less representative or elected government accountable in some way to the will of the populace; demographicalization, which is the process by which changes in the numbers of people, birth and death rates, age distributions etc. emerge as major factors affecting virtually all aspects of life; disintermediation, which is the process by which barriers for direct interaction between consumers of goods and services and the producers or providers of goods and services are removed thus permitting direct interaction and transaction between consumers and producers/suppliers; environmentalization, which is the process through which economic activities are redirected in order to make them more compatible with the growing requirements of economic sustainability; globalization, which is the process by which peoples and economies are being linked together in ways that do not reflect existing geopolitical boundaries; informationalization, which is the process by which virtually all economic and socio-political activities within and between peoples and nations are based upon the development and exchange of information; spiritualization, which is the process of incorporating a holistic spiritual balance in all organizations or activities; technologicalization, which is the process by which technological innovations control change in virtually every aspect of human endeavor by virtue of the increases in human capabilities that they generate; and virtualization, which is the process by which organizations with set locations, staffs, structures, and processes are replaced by organizations that exist largely through temporary functional arrangements not dependent on location or formal structures many functioning via computer-centered networks including the Internet.
A market experience describes how a change driver is experienced in a particular market. Identifying existing market experiences, in addition to market experiences that are predicted to develop in the future, is a key step in studying change in a market. Much can be learned from the comparison of cause, effect and development across market boundaries. Studying markets that have a mature market experience results in a wealth of real life knowledge that is applicable in markets that have a developing market experience.
For illustrative purposes, three exemplary market experiences that describe how an exemplary change driver is experienced will now be provided. In one exemplary market experience, a local government begins contracting out to private companies operations that the government has traditionally performed itself. An underlying change driver for this market experience is virtualization. Here, virtualization is experienced by the process of outsourcing traditional government operations to private companies that exist largely through temporary functional arrangements not dependent on location or formal structures. In a second exemplary market experience, an automobile assembly plant begins exchanging detailed information with an original equipment manufacturer. An exemplary underlying change driver for this market experience is informalization, which is experienced by the development of complex patterns of information exchange between companies in a supply chain. In a third exemplary market experience, a book publishing company offers tailor-made e-books directly to customers over the Internet. An exemplary underlying change driver for this market experience is disintermediation. Here, disintermediation is experienced by the development of companies that are exclusively Internet based and that sell directly to consumers.
Trends are the final building block of scenarios. Trends often exist in groups of similar market experiences and reveal the direction and speed of the ultimate impact of the market experiences. Trends establish a range of impact and a time horizon when applying all the building blocks to the creation or editing of a scenario. A trend cannot exist without a group of market experiences, and a market experience cannot exist without an underlying change driver.
If a company's customers developed scenarios for their respective industries and shared those scenarios with the company, the company would know its customers' vision of the future in their respective industries. Accordingly, the company would have information that would enable it to design and deliver better products and services for its customers. Also, if the company developed scenarios for its vision of the future and shared those scenarios with its customers, then its customers would be able to position themselves to take advantage of the company's future products and services.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems, devices, methods, and other tools that allow companies to create scenarios that provide companies with information about customers' visions of the future and that provide customers with information about companies' visions of the future.